Open Recall: Rolling Ubuntu and PC-BSD, efitools 1.4 and PressBook

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: Ubuntu rolling release discussion, PressBook for WordPress, Symfony 2.2, issue 10 of the MagPi, the new Debian trademark policy, efitools 1.4 and the first PC-BSD rolling release.

• Ubuntu rolling release discussion – After Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon was busy calming down users in January, saying Ubuntu was not switching to a rolling release model for the foreseeable future, it now looks like the discussion is back on the cards. Rick Spencer, Vice President for Ubuntu at Canonical, has re-opened the discussion with an email to the Ubuntu developer mailing list. This topic will be discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place this week.
  

• Ebook publishing for WordPress – The PressBooks plugin for WordPress transforms a multi-site install of the open source content management system into a publishing platform for ebooks, print-ready PDFs and other formats that are of interest to users wishing to publish books online. Users who do not want to install and maintain the plugin themselves can also buy a hosted version that includes support.
  

• Symfony 2.2 – After six months of development Fabien Potencier has released Symfony 2.2, the latest version of his open source PHP web application framework. New features include autocompletion on the command line, progress bars for long-running tasks, and clearer error messages in the HTTP stack. Users can now also get the status and incremental output from running processes. The source code for Symfony is available on GitHub under the MIT licence.
  

• The MagPi, issue 10 – The tenth issue of the Raspberry Pi magazine The MagPi has been published and includes hardware and software projects for readers to experiment with. PDFs for each issue can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's web site.
  

• Debian's new trademark policy – The Debian Project has announced a new trademark policy. The project's logos and marks can now be used for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. Usage of the trademarks is subject to a number of requirements that are explained as part of the new policy.
  

• New version of efitools released – James Bottomley has released efitools 1.4 for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. The latest version of the collection of utilities for the key enrolment infrastructure of UEFI Secure-Boot-enabled systems includes two new tools that allow the manipulation of the UEFI signatures database from userspace. These new tools only work with Linux 3.8, however, as they require the recently added efivarfs filesystem. Packages can be downloaded from the openSUSE project's servers and Bottomley refers users to the man pages of the tools package for further information.

• The first PC-BSD rolling release – The PC-BSD developers have released the first rolling release of their distribution, based on FreeBSD 9.1. Users of the original PC-BSD 9.1 release will in future be able to use an online update system to convert their system to the rolling release. More information on how to convert an existing FreeBSD 9.1 system to the PC-BSD rolling release is available on the PC-BSD Wiki.

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